meghan rose allen

I read:

Thoughts:

• Africa39 edited by Ellah Wakatama Allfrey: Reviewed earlier.
• I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou: Talked about here.
• Sideways Stories from Wayside School: As funny as I remembered it being, although I wish that there was less calling of things stupid and ugly. I don’t like either of those as pejoratives in children’s books, especially tied together (i.e. being stupid implies ugly, and ugly implies stupid, and being both somehow makes one less meritorious of respect and love).
• 10:04 by Ben Lerner: Reviewed earlier (although I initially typed Reviewered earlier and I kind of like Reviewered better than Reveiwed).
• Message from an Unknown Chinese Mother: Stories of Loss and Love by Xinran: I didn’t find it as affecting as The Good Women of China.
• And Home was Kariakoo by M.G. Vassanji: Reviewed earlier.
• The Son by Jo Nesbø: So, here’s a quote from this book: “The male brain’s innate understanding of three dimensions.” Yep, just going along swimmingly and then BAM unnecessary gender essentialism. But then, so close to that, he quotes Leonard Cohen – Oh I am torn. Otherwise, typical übermensch thriller, each shot our hero takes is on target and bullets seem to deflect from him like he’s doing that whoosh whoosh whoosh that Neo does in The Matrix. I felt smart because I figured out (some of) the plot before the big reveal. Yay me!

  Bonus: Writing this mini-review has given me a good mental review of the alt-codes for accents.

• Expo 58 by Jonathan Coe: Reviewed earlier.
• Battle for WondLa by Tony DeTerlizzi: Last book in a trilogy. I wasn’t sold on the first book, was happier with the second, and back to being displeased with the third. But I’m not the target audience, not being a YA science-fiction fan.
• Scatter is Too Great by Bilal Tanweer: Reviewed earlier.
• A Discovery of Witches by Deborah Harkness: I’m pretty sure I heard about this series from the author of Every Other Moment. And I tried. I tried so hard. And I hate it. I just have such a brain that cannot stomach 99% of the fantasy books out there. Why does no one in this book act rationally? It isn’t even endearingly irrational, like that Vorksagian Saga book I read that made no sense, but was somehow amusing in the nonsense.

  Plus, I was looking forward to reading it, and then it became a slog, so I got angrier. At least I had the sense to read synopses for the next too books in the series, rather than forcing myself to read them via some obsessive need for completeness.

• The Sorrows of An American by Siri Husdvedt: And then more ugggghhhk. Read for book-club. Typical, naval-gazing American novel that likely appeals to Americans (see 10:04). Parts seemed to be farcical (the cross-dressing stalker) without any amusement. Everything doubled like each character had a mirror for whatever aspect was happening at that point (two widows, two single people, two stalkers, two psychiatrists, two fatherless children, etc.). The lone bit that interested me was the movie that gets talked about – it was like a James Incadenza sort of film. They should have just made a movie of that and put this book far away from me.

  Although, like A Discovery of Witches, someone I know loves this book, completely adores it, can’t get enough of it. I do think if you are working through loss, especially that of a parent or spouse, then this book might be more appealing to you.

Favourite book of the month: This was a strange month. Of all the new books I read, none got five out of five stars. In fact, I feel really angry at books this month. Most got around three stars. Some got put down to one, one and a half. I read a book I didn’t like, followed by another one I didn’t like, and it made me grumpy (well, grumpier). So I don’t know. I guess Wayside School. It reminded me of being a kid.

Most promising book I put on my wishlist:

I don’t even remember how I found out about this, probably CBC or The Globe and Mail. I read, right after we moved here, When Alice Lay Down With Peter, just picking it randomly off the shelf of the library, and wondered why I’d never heard of it before. When Tesfa and I go to the library, she often “chooses” a book for me, and always chooses When Alice Lay Down With Peter, something about the spine of green mixed with purple I suppose.

So I will read Margaret Sweatman’s new novel whenever I find myself a copy.

I watched:

• Parks and Recreation: Reruns. On Netflix.
• Happy Endings: I’m not seeing the reason for the love, but I’m also not not seeing the reason for the love either. It’s fine; that’s about all the enthusiasm I can muster up. I haven’t got to the last episode. Maybe it’s a cliffhanger and everyone is upset there’s no closure? I don’t know. I like Adam Pally best, but am much happier he’s on The Mindy Project now.
• Thomas the Tank Engine: We watched a bunch of PBS in a hotel room before we trashed the place. Maybe not the trashing part. But the PBS part is true. And is there anything that says American Cultural Imperialism more than the fact that in the American versions of Thomas the Tank Engine, they overdub all the voices so that they are American accents. They even change the song at the end so that it has a country and western twist. I want my Ringo Starr reading me the story and all the accents from all over the UK for the trains!

  Next time we are in a hotel and Thomas the Tank Engine is on PBS, we will watch something else. I’ll have Tesfa watch the ones with British voices on youtube here at home.

I wrote: I had a story published. I typed an end to the faerie story. I did some thising and thating of typing up other pieces from the summer. But overall, nothing. I don’t even have stories I work on in my head as I go to sleep lately.

I read:

Thoughts:

• A Series of Unfortunate Events by Lemony Snicket: Tesfa and I are continuing to enjoy these. Perhaps me enjoying them a bit more than Tesfa, but still, I think they’re pretty clever. Plus I learned the difference between nervous and anxious, so I’m expanding my mind.
• The Waking Dead Compendium Two by Robert Kirkman: I think I’m done. I’ve got my fill of male-dominated, zombie adventures where the same thing keeps happening over and over and over and over again. Maybe I’ll just read the synopsis for Compendium Three on wikipedia.
• Save Yourself by Kelly Braffet: Oh my, this is an overly busy book. In three hundred pages we have high school bullying, drunk driving, infidelity, evangelical Christianity, failing family dynamics, class difference, and then because clearly that isn’t keeping enough balls in the air, there’s also a weird pseudo-goth vampire cult.

  I’m not kidding. There is a weird pseudo-goth vampire cult.

  Too many balls in the air.

• The Wanderer by Fanny Burney: There’s a comment on this book’s goodreads page that forms a rather apt description of this book:

  A book filled with good intentions and characters who made me want to climb into the book for the sole purpose of slapping them.

  So 19th century melodramatic filled with enough coincidences and fainting fits to last a lifetime. That said, it was so much more engaging than Pride and Prejudice. So there! I’ve read a 19th century British book about women and marriage and middle and upper-class places in society and I enjoyed it. There is hope for me yet!

• Malarky by Anakana Schofield: Like most experimental novels I read, at first I slogged, forcing myself through. But then, after a little while, when the logic of that, particular, fictional universe start to make sense, and I began to enjoy myself, as much as you can enjoy a novel about a slide into dementia and an unhappy marriage and the way reality can fracture at any second. Double bonuses too for the use of the name Philomena, which I adore. It’s so Catholic sounding, perhaps because the only people I’ve ever met with that name are Irish or Filipino Catholics.

  So, if you start and aren’t sure whether to continue, my opinion is to keep going and try it out. What have you got to lose?

• Such Bright Prospects: Short Stories about Asperger Syndrome, Alcohol, and God by Tessie Regan: Reviewed here.
• Meatspace by Nikesh Shkula: Reviewed here.
• The Unenviable by David G. Mirich, PhD: I got this book to read because I thought it would be good for me, like eating kale. But then I couldn’t put the book down and read it all in two sittings (had to go pick up Tesfa at the bus stop so I had a break).
• My Real Children by Jo Walton: Being released so close to Life After Life and with similarities in plot, one can’t help but compare these two books; unfortunately My Real Children is the one that ends up lacking simply because Jo Walton cannot write as wonderfully as Kate Atkinson. Most people can’t.

  This isn’t to say I didn’t enjoy My Real Children; I’d rank it four out of five, but I had the same problem with My Real Children as I did with the other Jo Walton book I read, Among Others: it was close, but not quite.

  I feel kinship with Jo Walton. Like me, she is an above average author (although Jo Walton could likely be classified as far more above average than me, like I am epsilon above average and Jo Walton is some number far larger than epsilon, like when you use $$>>$$ rather than simply $>$ in functional analysis and all that area of mathematics that I don’t like). There are times when the writing is so good. Then there are times when the writing isn’t. Maybe she (and I?) just need a really talented editor to help us out.

  She’s also Welsh and I’m part Welsh so I think we could hang out. She’s probably read Dylan Thomas and How Green Was My Valley though, so maybe we’d talk about non-Welsh things.

• The Great and Calamitous Tale of Johan Thoms: Reviewed here.
• The Rescue Princesses: The Lost Gold: I’m pretty sure y’all could figure out that this was not so much a Meghan choice as a Tesfa choice. Geoff despises these books but I don’t know – they have POC princesses, the princesses are the protagonists and do things (figuring out solutions as to how to save animals), the princesses (at least in this book) stood up against adults. Sure, these books aren’t going to win any awards for writing, but I’m not going to be too down on a series of books of multiracial girls solving their own problems.
• The Little Stranger: I kept thinking something more was going to happen in this book, that there’d be a big reveal like Endless Night by Agatha Christie, but it didn’t, so the novel sort of flatlined.

  And now, so any of my ultra-literary readers can have a laugh: I first read Endless Night by Agatha Christie when I was in high school. In high school, I also really liked The Doors and their song End of the Night has the lyrics

  Some are born to sweet delight,
  Some are born to endless night.

  And I thought, Wow, Agatha Christie was in her sixties when she wrote Endless Night and here she is quoting The Doors in the book and for the title. What a hip old lady Agatha Christie must have been.

  Yeah, both The Doors and Agatha Christie were quoting Auguries of Innocence (1803) by William Blake. I didn’t realize that until I was like 25 years old. I’ll still assume, however, that Agatha Christie was a hip old lady.

• X’ed Out: A unlikable male protagonist stumbles through dream after dream! It’s like Charles Burns put everything I hate into a graphic novel. I need to make a tumblr or something of books that have lengthy dream sequences because I hate dream sequences so much. It’s not as bad as the long, drugged out dream sequence in At Play In The Fields of the Lord but any description of a dream over three words is too long for me. And X’ed Out has pictures of dreams, so that’s just too much for me to handle.
• Otherwise Known as Sheila The Great: Wow. I did not remember (a) how whiny and unlikeable Sheila is, (b) how much fat shaming this book contains, and (c) the liberal use of the word stupid to describe pretty much everything.

Favourite book of the month:

I read this book constantly when I was a kid. I was always so impressed at the chutzpah Willo Davis Roberts had that when Katie, the protagonist in The Girl With The Silver Eyes is talking about what books she likes, she lists The View From The Cherry Tree, another Willo Davis Roberts book. This blew my ten year old mind that authors could self-promote.

I read this book again in my twenties and was disappointed, but now, reading it in my thirties with Tesfa, this book is awesome. I don’t know what was going through my mind when I read it at 24. I must have been stupid that day or something.

Most promising book put on wishlist:

New David Mitchell!

I watched:

Thoughts:

• The Mindy Project: I have now watched every Mindy Project episode probably like three times. I am sort of obsessed with The Mindy Project right now (and The Hunger Games movies, which I think I like better than the books).

  There’s a comment on IMDB about The Mindy Project which, when I read it, realized made so much sense to me as to why I like the show. The link is here and I’ll quote the comment too, even if the spacing ends up weird and thin (ignore please the gender essentialism the commenter throws in):

  There’s two things about The Mindy Project I can’t deny – one, is I can’t stop watching it. I got through season 1 in a week and it makes me laugh and ship characters and hate and love characters and it’s all the experiences you’d expect from any guilty-pleasure TV show. The other one is that it annoys the pants off me. It screams Vanity Project, it’s literally let’s watch Mindy Kaling’s savy-stylish-doctor-in-NYC fantasies, it literally feels like watching the daydreams of a part-time nursing student on a crowded 6am bus. She’s surrounded by impossibly handsome men, most of which she has slept with and/or are in love with her, she’s witty, great at her job, independent super woman who never wears the same outfit twice.

  But then I realised, that’s the reason why I like this show so much. It is the female version of a geeky boy living out his fantasies through Transformers. It is a show where every single male character is defined by their relationship to Mindy, which is the most unsettling and fascinating role reversal I have EVER seen on TV. We are so used to seeing female characters defined by how men see them, we take it for granted. We are so used to having a geeky/loser/relatable MALE main characters, just think of every movie you’ve seen. Peter Parker. William Miller in Almost Famous. Heck, the dude in the Lego Movie. And they’re all surrounded by these invariably gorgeous, invariably flirty women and we just accept that. All Mindy Kaling did was turn that to HER advantage in her TV show. It strikes us as narcissistic, but boy is she catering to the fantasies of gazillions of women besides herself along the way. Including mine. Danny Castellano is the best implementation of the good-hearted grump fantasy I’ve ever seen. No it’s not realistic, but are movies ever? Why does it have to be realistic just because the main character is ‘outside traditional beauty standards’? This series is no political statement, it is a series written to get women hooked and it does just that. And I’m loving it.

• American Horror Story: I’m still not done Season One. I keep getting bored and only watching for ten minutes at a time.
• Bojack Horseman: The show amused me. I can’t really quantify how or why, just that I enjoyed it. Maybe because of Arrested Development associations in my mind.
• Happy Endings: This is my new HIMYM show, in that I watch it and think Why am I watching this? I do know why (because Adam Pally went to The Mindy Project after this and I’m all about The Mindy Project right now) but I need to stop. A lot of internet people told me Happy Endings was a good show. It is a passable show. I’m not going to go any higher than that.
• Parks and Rec: Just rewatching the old episodes on American Netflix. Mindy might be pushing Parks and Rec out of my number one position though right now. Time will tell.

I wrote: At Geoff’s suggestion, I am not working on anything in particular right now. I’m doing writing exercises and plotting the dénouement of my faerie story, trying to get better before I attack some new plans later in the season.

I read:

• Izzy, Willy Nilly: 80s YA written by someone who I don’t believe has ever actually met or was ever a teenager, or, when they were a teenager, were a teenager like me, quiet, studious, asleep each Saturday night by nine to be awake for church at eight. Every character has one trait and one trait only. No one has depth. But the book is a hardcover from the library and smells the way old hardcovers from the library do (the rotting bookbinding glue) so I breathe it in. But then the story is full of girls who only care about being pretty and popular, so I am sad again. Why is Izzy so concerned with giving Rosamunde a makeover? Rosamunde doesn’t want one. Being pretty isn’t everything.
• After the Fire, A Still Small Voice: A so what? book, i.e. I got to the end and thought so what? Beautiful writing doesn’t make up for characters whose change is so subtle that I guess I missed it. The same at the beginning, the same at the end.

  Also, this is very, unapologetically Australian novel. I spent much time on http://www.koalanet.com.au/australian-slang.html to decipher what was going on. Australians. Reminds me of Costa Rica and the Australians I worked with, people who have faded from me in the ten years since then. There are days when I would give anything to go back to that. So I think of this book and I yearn for nothing that this book even touched on, other than people who live in another hemisphere where summer and winter are reversed, people who get long summer breaks over Christmas.

• The Language of Flowers: A book that kept raising my hopes, but then would veer into melodrama and over-explanation. So I’d get frustrated and want to quit, but it was for book club so I kept going. To be fair, I would have kept going anyway. Books like this make me wonder what happened to editors.
• The One and Only: Each time I complain about Jane Austen, I always say that I feel like I’m reading the 1810’s chick-lit. Then I wonder if the chick-lit of today is going to end up classic 2010’s novels of manners in the same way. I hope not, especially since that would mean books like The One and Only will stick around for ever. I didn’t mind the other Emily Giffen books nearly as much as this one, which I’m close to despising. Perhaps its the very-and-obviously-so photoshopped author’s photo (although this may be a marketing decision). I don’t care what my author’s look like. Maybe it’s the issue of the week feel with the domestic abuse/violence in sports situation, which, rather than natural, feels like someone told her to pick and issue to lend your book gravitas and manipulate your readers into thinking that this is a serious novel. Maybe that’s it. Maybe I liked Emily Giffen better when she was writing silly books about people in farcical situations.
  
  In any case, I think this will be the last Emily Giffen book I read.
• Secret of Grim Hill: Some children’s books are enjoyable for adults (like Roald Dahl). Some less so. This one is less so.
• Walking Dead Compendium One: You know how you read about cults and fringe groups how they normalize the crazy. Everything starts out normal and then small changes and more small changes until you are in all the way and don’t realize it. I keep feeling that The Walking Dead is kind of like a MRA-misogynistic version of that, like it’s trying to nudge your thinking that way. Or maybe I’m overthinking it and Robert Kirkman is just a dick.
• The Westing Game: I hadn’t read this in a long time. It’s still engaging, but maybe I stayed engaged because I remember a world without cellphones. This is one of those novels where a lot could have been solved in minutes with cellphones.
• School for Good and Evil: Probably fitting that a book about being either good or evil ends up being neither with a bunch of muddled motivations and characters. Tries to subvert fairy tale essentials, but then ends up reinforcing them (most glaringly the good/beautiful evil/ugly dichotomy) alongside a heavy-handed subplot with GLBTQ overtones regarding love. Plus the endless italics and ambiguous pronouns getting in the way. Verdict: One of those books that I want to just take and fix it by rewriting it myself. It’s like How did this ever get published at the same time as I’m so jealous I didn’t think of this first.
• Lemony Snicket #1: The Bad Beginning: As I mentioned before, I am really liking Lemony Snicket. I always think of the writer/storyteller divide. Some writers are writers and some are storytellers (yes, I know it’s confusing that a writer could not be a writer. I’m used to this nonsense considering a did a PhD in Combinatorial Game Theory where game means a set of mathematical objects that satisfy some certain conditions, the ruleset for a specific game, or a position within a game depending on the context). Some are both. J.K. Rowling is a storyteller (I think, I haven’t read Harry Potter in years): you’re reading Harry Potter for the plot, not for the language. But Lemony Snicket, I’m reading for both. It amuses both me and Tesfa.
• Niko: Q: How does a five (out of five) star novel become a three (out of five) star novel? A: Have a protagonist suddenly be struck with amnesia on page 143. We’re not a novel in from the 1800s. Amnesia as a plot device has been thoroughly played out. Then have the last twenty pages have dialogue that sounds like it was written by a computer AI from the 1980s. This seems to be the month of book disappointment for me. Maybe it’s less the books. Maybe I’m just sour this month.

Most promising book put on wishlist:

I’ve read some good reviews. So there it is.

I watched:

• The Mindy Project: I am rewatching The Mindy Project is a very obsessive way.
• Southcliffe: I watched one episode. I might watch more when Tesfa is back in school.
• The Hunger Games: Oh my this movie stressed me out, even though I’d read the books and knew what would happen. I’m still stressed out now, a few days later. I need to stop getting so emotionally involved in movies.
  
  Right before we started watching, I saw our DVD of The Princess and The Warrior sitting on the shelf of DVDs that we have yet never watch. Maybe it was because of that glimpse, but I had the same feelings about the male protagonists of both movies – I would never see how he could be attractive, but by the end, I was like “Yeah, I can see it.” So yeah, I would totally, in an age-appropriate way, see how Peeta would be attractive. I think, even if I hadn’t read the book, I would have got the subtext, that Katniss is convincing herself, at some level, to play the audience in regards to her and Peeta. I remember reading articles about that when the movie came out. Or maybe I wouldn’t. Who knows. Yay movies!

I wrote: Nothing. See here.

But, my chapbook, which I submitted to The Rusty Toque Chapbook contest got an Honourable Mention (I got an email about that this morning, will link to announcement when it goes public). Any publishers looking for a chapbook, I’ve got one with an honourable mention all ready for you.

I read:

• The Snow Child: This was a novel that could have been a novella, that maybe could have even been a short story. One of those books with too many words dragging it down. Not that it was bad, just wordy. I could get away with reading maybe three words per paragraph and still know what was going on.
• The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland In A Ship Of Her Own Making: I read the first third of this book while on prescription pain medication and it was awesome. The it in the previous sentence is key. It might have just been awesome to be on prescription pain medication since I’m not one hundred percent sure I just didn’t make up what happened in the first one hundred-odd pages. For example: I put a marker in for a page with a wonderful quote, and now have read and re-read that page off medication and cannot find any quote there that really needs marking. And I didn’t enjoy the last two thirds at all. Morale: to enjoy fantasy, I need to get on drugs.
• A Marker to Measure Drift – This is one of those write the books you want to read; this is the book I want to write, the ability to write about monstrous happenings without exploiting or trivializing them and without using horrible events as a shortcut for emotional or character development (see my earlier complaints about Sarah’s Key and Those Who Save Us).
• Harriet the Spy: Discussed here.
• The Bear: The shtick of the five-year old narrator becomes grating around the fiftieth page. Then I got annoyed. Then I stopped enjoying it.
• Mr Penumbra’s 24 Hour Bookstore: This I enjoyed reluctantly since it was obviously google-porn. The google stuff was so aspiring to be Microserfs almost it was funny. Maybe I’ll dig up my copy of Microserfs and read it again. It’s much more interesting to read about a tech company with a critical and satirical eye rather than a fawning one (Seriously, does the the author of Mr Penumbra’s 24 Hour Bookstore work at google? Did they pay him or something?)

  Now spoilers (highlight to read):
  I’m not sold on the code being anything more than a simple substitution cipher, even if they try to present it as notches on the letters rather than the letters themselves. For instance, the example they give is that lower case X has four notches and four notches corresponds to something (say T). But then, if all lower case X’s have four notches, than that’s just the same as lower case X corresponding to T. They’ve just run it through an isomorphism. Even if, as they say there are some more complications, like certain double letters (example in book is ff) having notches corresponding to other letters, there are some really complicated code breaking techniques that can still account for things like that, even some not so complicated ones, like frequency analysis and doing it over things like single letters, pairs, triples, etc., that might catch things like that.

  Unless every single letter in the typeset was different each time, I don’t see how this isn’t anything other than a substitution cipher.

  And that’s all my cryptanalytic complaints laid out in full.

• Tiger, Tiger: I continue to read more about pedophiles, this one a memoir.
• Plain Jane: Talked about here
• Hollow City: Another book, like The Bear, that had a shtick, but while the photos were sort of novelty in the prequel Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children, they seem forced here and overdone.

Best book:

I still love this book as much as when I was a kid. I read it to Tesfa. She thought it was all right.

Most promising book put on my wishlist:

And since I won a copy from goodreads, I’ll actually for once read my most promising book put on my wishlist promptly.

I watched:

• 30 Rock: I got to the end. It took me a week to get through the finale, which was the only reason I started watching the show because of a clip from the finale (Thank you, America, that’s our show. Not a lot of people watched it, but the joke’s on you, ’cause we got paid anyway, which I thought was kind of cheeky and piqued my interest). Even after all of the episodes, I feel nothing. I cried in the finale of The Office and I cried when Ben and Leslie kissed in the smallest park in Pawnee and I even felt a little bad when Ted got left at the altar, but 30 Rock made me feel no feelings at all.
• Parks and Recreation: I don’t know how they’re going to come back from the season finale. It seems so perfect for an ending. Maybe I’ll just end up hating the final season.
• Silicon Valley: Discussed here.
• Mad Men: Mad Men is like comfortable slippers that remind me of last year when Tesfa was still in Montessori and I was still a bit more hopeful than I am now.

I wrote: I worked on my post-modern story about a fan and some faerie work. Zero publishing news, unless rejections count.